lonely roadby
imagesloyolaComment by emorgan49: Hello from the Critique Club - Sorry I'm late. Life intervened in the form of a sixteen year old son, a stop sign, and the side of my car. Son is fine, car is not.
I'm glad, actually, that I waited to review your photo because in the meantime I have calibrated all the monitors that I use and now your road looks much better. I can see the children in your other two submissions too. I think that many people who vote do not have their gamma thing adjusted and therefore see a photo like this one very dark. There were several comments about it being to dark, which it is not. And while I'm on the subject of voters, remember that this is an amateur bunch. Some do not even own cameras. In your case you lost a lot of points because people couldn't read the sign. If it had been a familiar US roadsign which have standard recognizable shapes it wouldn't have been an issue, but it is in arabic and people wanted to know what it said. We Americans are a narrow minded bunch. We forget the rest of the world exists.
Looks like I have started out with the negative stuff so I"ll continue and then get to the good stuff. Another reason I think you are not gettting the scores you deserve on all three of your previous entries is that they are "too small". You are not taking advantage of the maximum size allowed. I think this is a mistake because you lose a lot of potential for detail if the image appears smaller on my screen. Lonely road is only 328 x 476 pixels when the rules state that you can use anything up to 640. Why not take advantage of the max?
That's the end of my bad comments- just that voters are picky and that pixels are lacking. Now the good comments. This picture is STUNNING!
Lonely Road is a perfect photograph in all respects. Where can I start? It is a masterpiece of composition!. First it is divided into thirds, that magicly pleasing division based on the biology of a humans field of view. The lower third is darker and weights the upper two thirds of sky.
The leading lines of the road go to a vanishing point in another thirds position. All the curved lines lead into the picture, nothing leads out. It feels like a black hole. Even the lines of the clouds are pointing and swirling towards that distant destination. The uprights of the road signs (I don't care what they say) all contrast with the curves of the road, but they, too, tilt slightly inwards as if they are being sucked into the vortex. I love the repeating patterns of the dots and dashes. The dots in the center strip are echoed by the dashes at the edge of the road and again but the concrete barriers which are dashes with dots on top. Lovely. Texture in the foreground smooths out in the background and reappears in the sky.
Black and white is the perfect choice. The grey tones are all muted except for the road sign which stands out by being dark. Nothing is bright white. Nice. Another advantage of chosing black and white is that I think it makes the photo sort of universal. For me, and where I live, I imagine that there is an ocean out to the right, beyond the barriers, and that the buildings on the left are coastal. But I can also imagine how it could be interpreted as snow over there, or sand, or a large lake. No matter what you think you see it is in the "vast nothingness" category, or maybe I mean "vast nature-being-stronger -than-man feeling". The road is clinging to the frontier of overpowering landscape and weather. Just barely holding on, maybe about to be flooded, or blown away. The little human buildings on the left look fragile and temporary. And there is no one there. Lonely lonely. Lonely because there is barely a trace of humans. The road signs and lamp posts don't feel like they were put there by people, they feel like part of the landscare. Only the building looks man made, but maybe deserted. ANd lonely because of the hugeness of the sky and land you show, a person would feel very tiny. Would he even cast a shadow? None of the road posts do.
Techinical stuff? all perfect, perfect focus, perfect lighting, perfect BW balance, perfect post editing (if any, maybe the photo was perfect to begin with), percect focus....um what else is there? I'm sure it is perfect even if I forgot to mention it.
This is a very tight, professional, controlled, planned out photo. Nothing extraneous to the visual or emotional message was included. I hope you continue to submit. The rest of us could learn a lot by studying your images. Next time, please, make the picture bigger. You deserve to win some ribbons here.
Now the disclaimer - remember that this is only my opinion and I am not an expert, far from it.
Message edited by author 2003-02-04 12:05:20. 
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